The biggest surprise I’ve ever given my parents was last year when I told them that I was getting into professional wrestling. My online presence here and on Twitter reflects my real-life interests and hobbies closely, and as you can tell from a scan of my article and review index most of what I read and watch leans toward high culture. I’ll dip into popular culture with things like Devilmannow and then, but overall I’m more likely to be reading French poetry or something. I have little interest in sports generally, and most guys who are into wrestling started watching when they were young. I remember several friends in middle school talking about it, but I had little interest. So what happened?

Well, over the last few years I’ve noticed that a lot of people in my Twitter circles are into wrestling. Though hardly as visible as the Anime Right, Right-wing Pro Wrestling Twitter is surprisingly big even if its members tend to mask their power level. I had a few friends in particular who enjoyed it and when they gave an open invitation to watch an upcoming NXT event I figured I’d see what it’s all about. Needless to say, I enjoyed it, watched a few recommended matches from yesteryear, joined in with almost every group-watch this group of friends has done since, and eventually subscribed to NJPW’s (New Japan Pro Wrestling) online streaming service.

It’s sometimes difficult to explain why we enjoy the things we do, but for pro wrestling I can point to a few things. A big one is the social aspect, which is largely what got me to watch that first event. It’s fun watching something with friends and talking about a shared hobby. As for the wrestling itself, I love the athletic performance. Yes, it’s scripted, but so are most things on TV so who cares. These guys are doing incredible things in the ring and it’s great fun to watch.…

For the sake of both practising my French and reading something I’m interested in, I’ve started reading through a book straightforwardly titled French Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Elliott M. Grant and first published in 1932 (my copy is a 1950 reprint). I haven’t worked through much of it yet, but I have a learned a few things about French poetry generally and now know a couple fine poets I hadn’t previously even been aware of.

One of those is Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, an actress who had a pair of intense but short-lived romances early in her life, which inspired some of her poems, before settling down with Mr. Valmore, another actor. Her first poems were published in 1813, with the poem below, “Le Rendez-vous,” appearing in 1825.…

It’s hard to remember, but I’m pretty sure I first learned about mahjong (not mahjong solitaire) in the same way I’ve learned about most things in my life, Japanese cartoons. It looked interesting so when I saw a mahjong set for sale at a Half Price Books years ago I went ahead and bought it, got a book on mahjong, and never learned how to play. I didn’t know anyone who played and the mahjong software selection is bad enough now and was even worse then.

My interest was rekindled a few months ago after playing gin rummy for a while and one of my Twitter friends mentioned that he’d learned the basics of mahjong by thinking of it as essentially a rummy game. After all, the premise is that you’re forming tiles into sets, either sequences (e.g., 1-2-3 of the same suit) or three or four of a kind to form a winning hand. I re-read my book, managed to find a decent mahjong iOS app to practice with, and even found a group in my area to play with IRL.

Yes, there is wind left in my soul, though I am growing old. If you’re wondering about the lack of updates, it comes down to what I talked about last May. I’m working full time, going to grad school part-time, and through May had an internship at a local library, as well, and am still volunteering there once per week. Of course, I also have hobbies outside of blogging that I enjoy keeping up with.

Frankly, I also haven’t had as much to write about recently. Most of the books and movies I’ve watched over the past few months have been James Bond material, which I don’t have a lot to say about though I may do a write-up on my take on the series so far. I’ve also been playing mahjong and watching wrestling and I don’t have the experience and expertise to turn this into a mahjong or wrestling blog, though I’ll likely write a little about them at some point.

So what to do? My idea is to do a short write-up for each of these things I have been doing, but my only reservation is that for years now this has been a review blog, and this move would basically turn it into The Pillow Blog of Cheshire_Ocelot, something of a personal journal. That would be a sharp turn in subject matter, but it’s either that or not having any updates at all for a long while. So, we’ll see how it goes.

‘Of course’, said Queequeg. ‘Man want to die, nothing can save him. Man want to live, only God can kill him – or whale or storm, maybe’.

Recently, while shelving books in my library’s children’s section, I noticed a picture book with an especially striking cover and was somewhat surprised to see the title, Moby Dick. Herman Melville’s Great American Novel is hardly something I expected to find on the kid’s fiction shelves, but I was curious about how it would be adapted so I checked it out.

I like to style myself a literary omnivore, but one genre I’ll admit I seldom touch is biography. I’ve read one on Robert E. Lee, and back in high school and college I read some biographies of various rock bands, but I preferred those that focused primarily on their music and secondarily on the musicians’ personal lives. A recent review, of The Printed Homer, included some biographical speculation, but ultimately one can’t really write a biography of a man about whom we know so little for certain that we’re not even sure if he was one dude or multiple dudes.

Marco Santagata stands on firmer ground in his biography of Dante Alighieri (translated from Italian by Richard Dixon), titled simply Dante: The Story of His Life, though he did run into some difficulties of his own. Typically I like to start reviews on a positive note, but any biography of Dante will have two significant problems to deal with, and though Santagata’s book is quite good overall one does need to be aware of them.

First, Dante’s life is inextricably tied up with Florentine politics. Readers of his Divine Comedy will undoubtedly have noticed how many contemporary political figures appear, and multiple works after La Vita Nuova, such as Convivio and Monarchia, at least touch on political theory or practice in some way. This means that a huge portion of Santagata’s book is spent discussing the ins and outs of Florentine political theatre and that of Italy more broadly. For those keenly interested in Italian history or who are just political junkies this won’t be a problem at all, but anyone expecting a sort of “real life novel” style of biography will find themselves skimming pages at a time of explanations of shifting alliances, ideologies, and political manoeuvring.

Go Nagai has long been an artist I’ve been aware of and was interested in perhaps checking out someday, but I only got around to doing so recently. My interest was piqued last year when I watched Yuasa Masaaki’s anime adaptation of Nagai’s comic Devilman, titled Devilman Crybaby. Yuasa is always excellent and this anime was no exception, and as soon as I saw that Seven Seas had published the first half of the original in an omnibus edition I picked it up right away. They released the second and final omnibus late last year and I recently finished it and, though it’s been a while since I last reviewed a comic, I figured I’d share a few thoughts about it.

The protagonist is high schooler Fudo Akira, who isn’t exactly a wimp but definitely doesn’t have much backbone. His friend, rich genius Ryo, asks for his help with something and takes him to a rave crazier than a Chick tract, where crap happens and he ends up merging with a demon, making him part-devil and part-man, Devilman. So, now that he has awesome powers (and a far more aggressive personality) Ryo explains that demons are roaming the earth seeking to destroy humanity, and asks for his help in stopping them. Those who’ve seen Crybaby will know what’s up, and those who are new to Devilman are in for a hell of a ride. As one may expect from only two omnibus volumes, the story is short and keeps up a brisk pace throughout. The first 2/3 or so is more-or-less episodic, with most chapters using action scenes to nudge the plot forward, though a handful of time-travel themed chapters are, frankly, just filler and Crybaby was right to exclude them. The last third is by far the most intense, with betrayals, characters dying left-and-right, and leading up to a contender for the bleakest ending I’ve ever seen in a work of fiction.…

Philip H. Young’s The Printed Homer: A 3000 Year Publishing and Translation History of the Iliad and the Odyssey is an odd book to recommend to laymen because about half of it will be useful only to a very focused class of specialists. The other half, though, is of interest to any Classicist, professional or amateur, and is enough to justify buying the whole package.

The specialist half can be dealt with very briefly. Young has compiled a comprehensive list of every known printing of Homer’s works (including those spuriously attributed to him, such as the Hymns) from the first example in 1470 to 2000. It’s an impressive undertaking and I’m sure it’s very helpful for historians who specifically study historical interest in and treatment of the Homeric texts. For laymen such as myself, though, I find it hard to imagine a plausible scenario where this part of the book might be useful.

The rest of the book, though, discusses a range of material that I found fascinating and enlightening as an introduction to the Homeric Question, how the texts were created and transmitted, and how Homer was received, interpreted, and admired from ancient Greece to modernity, as well as Young’s own defense of why Homer is worth studying. I’ll just give a sample of each chapter.…

Not that long ago the common complaint around the Right (broadly defined) was that we needed more dissident artists and authors. Over the past year or two, though, that situation has been reversing itself and it feels like everyone who’s anyone now has a novel coming out. I’ve reviewed Neovictorian’s book Sanitypreviously, and Neovictorian himself has reviewed Sanctionand The Brave and the Bold, while in short fiction there’s enough material for Logos Club to offer a weekly overview of it all. Now, to call all of this “Right-wing” is to sell it short; most of it is not explicitly ideological, and in general these authors are most interested in being artists first, philosophers second, if at all. Despite that, though, given Leftist dominance of traditional publishers the people most likely to be drawn to independent outlets and self-publishing are disproportionately going to be Right-of-Centre, whether that means Right-Libertarian, Throne and Altar Monarchist, or someone in between.

So, let’s take a look at a recent entry in this unexpectedly crowded field, Garth Ogle’s science fiction novel The Bowl of Tears and Solace, published late last year by Saints Edward Media. In short, it was the best graphic novel I’ve read in a long time.

“Wait,” you might be thinking, “isn’t this a regular prose novel?” Yes. That’s the novel’s strength and weakness. I like Ogle’s style, the ideas are intriguing, and the book is full of strong individual scenes. I also found the plot very difficult to follow, and the many action scenes in particular would have been better served in a visual medium like film or comics. To take an example from early in the book:

“It’s private,” I say. “Can we get to – ” but I am cut off by a sudden –

THUD

I rush to the door. This being a back street in the middle of the afternoon, I wonder how a tram accident could have happened. But then I see it.

In the middle of the road, just aside from the rail on the left, is a massive, gray– bug. It is, as best as I can tell, on top of a man, who does not seem to be benefiting from the exercise.

The handful of pedestrians just watch, as in a dream, seeming to me, perhaps, to wonder if it is real. Then I see something happen very quickly.

Across the street, on the right side of the road, I see a woman, with her hair up in a ponytail and dark glasses on. In a moment she is in shadow and there is a bright halo around her. With a motion too quick for me to see, she has drawn a rod and leaping, struck the insect on the back. The air itself shudders oddly with the blow, as if gravity itself were disrupted by the end of her rod. The insect collapses, bloodless and crumpled, and she, returning to normal begins doing something furtively with her handheld computer.

As I watch, in a matter of minutes, a golden man descends from the sky, and the woman throws off her glasses and unbinds her hair.

“CONGRATULATIONS!” he bellows, to the passersby. “YOU’VE BEEN VISITED BY THE DEFENDERS OF G-1! LET ME TELL YOU WHAT YOU’VE WON!”

I blink and turn back to the proprietor, who is idly dusting a glass case.

“I think a man just died out there.”

“No, it’s all a show. They keep it interesting here,” he replies impatiently.

It’s a striking scene, but one that loses most of its force in print. The novel is full of scenes along these lines, and if you have a stronger imagination than I do and can fully visualise them you’ll probably enjoy the book. Again, even I enjoyed most of the novel in spite of the action coming up short for me, because following the threads of what exactly this “show” is all about, as well as the plot of our protagonist discovering an almost miraculous cure and its consequences, was enough to hold my interest the whole way through. Even some of the action stands up; there are a few points where a character has a prophetic dream of the near-future, and Ogle successfully builds and maintains a lot of tension as he prepares to deal with the upcoming event.

If I’m being vague about the plot, it’s largely because the mystery is part of the appeal and I don’t want to spoil anything. Also, I struggled somewhat to follow it, especially at the rather abstract climax. I suppose I could talk about the themes, which I’ve seen the author mention on Twitter, but since I had to read the book over a longer period of time than usual for me I must have missed the connecting threads and didn’t get it.

So, do I recommend The Bowl of Tears and Solace? If you’re a voracious reader and are looking for something contemporary, sure, it’s worth a shot. If you’re a more casual reader and need to really pick your shots, I think there’s enough here that it’s definitely worth looking forward to Ogle’s next novel.…

In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound wrote that a man can’t fully understand poetry if he reads only one language. Later on, when listing authors important to the development of English poetry he also included a few Frenchman. With both those points in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to include a few French poets even though the focus of this list is on English authors. So, today we’ll meet M. François Villon.

M. Villon is a pseudonym for François de Montcorbier or François des Loges, who was born in Paris in 1431. He led such an eventful life that it’s worth reading at least an article about him, but in short he spent much of his life in prison and banishment, for such crimes as robbery and killing a priest during a fight between them and some drinking friends, and traveling around France. The last we hear of him, he was on death row for his part in a brawl, but that sentence was commuted to ten years banishment from Paris by the Parlement in January 1563. What happened to him next is unkown.

As for his poetry, I’m not familiar enough with French verse to offer HSOs of my own so I’ll have to lean on others’ accounts. His poetry is technically impressive with difficult metres and rhyme schemes, and he was quite knowledgeable of the world of poetry past and present. It seems that his medieval university education did indeed take hold, despite his raucous lifestyle. His best-known work is the long poem Le Testament, which expresses his fears and laments his wasted youth. Let’s take a look at a selection from Le Testament, “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (“Ballade of Ladies of Time Gone By”).